Debate Masters

I didn't watch the Republican candidates' debate last night, but I saw out-takes this morning and that was more than enough. It looks to me like nearly all of these guys are werewolves, vampires, mutants, or in Romney's case, a robot. McCain was the only one that came off like a human being, because he doesn't deny the obvious. At least he knows that waterboarding is torture.

The Republican nominee will be Romney. Giuliani is an obnoxious creep, and a crook. The details of how he ripped off the City of New York when he was adulterously wooing his -- what is it? -- third wife? -- haven't been fully revealed yet, but they will be.

"Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records," Ben Smith at Politico reports.


So what's the alternative to President R2-D2 Romney? It's pretty obvious to most American voters that the Democrats are the lesser of two weevils. The problem is, I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton if she was running against Darth Vader.

Informal Fallacy, Pt. 1: Straw Man

It might be fun to revisit some of the most common informal fallacies, because we see and hear so many of them these days. Let's start with that old favorite, the straw man.

Debaters construct straw men by deliberately misinterpreting their opponents' arguments, then use these distortions to attribute opinions to the opponent which he or she does not hold. Debater A then gleefully demoishes the straw man he himself has created. It works well if the audience is unsophisticated and gullible, as most are.

With this in mind, consider Dinesh D'Souzas contention that the conflicts between scientists and religious fundamentalists are the fault of...atheists.

About a hundred years ago, two anti-religious bigots named John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White wrote books promoting the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between science and God. The books were full of facts that have now been totally discredited by scholars. But the myths produced by Draper and Dickson continue to be recycled. They are believed by many who consider themselves educated, and they even find their way into the textbooks. In this article I expose several of these myths, D'Souza recently wrote as historical introduction to this topic.

There's the setup. Now watch for the hayguy:

According to the atheist narrative, the medieval Christians all believed that the earth was flat until the brilliant scientists showed up in the modern era to prove that it was round. In reality, educated people in the Middle Ages knew that the earth was round. In fact, the ancient Greeks in the fifth century B.C. knew the earth was a globe. They didn’t need modern science to point out the obvious.

OK, class, what medieval theory is Galileo famous for debunking? Was it the belief that the world is flat? That doesn't sound right, let's see...

D'Souza is a fairly popular fascist writer and the author of books with silly titles like "The Enemy at Home." He's done more than his share to kick off the revival of McCarthyism we're seeing these days. When you read people like this or listen to wingnut radio, try keeping a list of informal fallacies handy, along with a sharp pencil.

Many thanks to Sadly, no for this item, quotes, and the idea.

Little Miss McClellan

Scott took some Immodium
And stepped up to the podium
To answer some questions re: Plame.

Along came a spider
Who said "I'm the decider,
Just tell 'em that I'm not to blame.

"And you better say it like you really believe it, you little shit."

She Married a Bumpkin

I kind of like the blog "Blue Girl in a Red State." She has a way of combining her personal and political lives that brings them home, so they fit under the roof, so to speak.

She was greatly jazzed by her mother's account of watching the Democratic debate together with stepdad (which proves conclusively that somebody in a regular household watched at least one of those things) and then getting into a hot political argument with this curmudgeon.

"There's nothing I love more than thinking of the two of them sitting in their living room arguing about politics," says the always-deadpan Blue Girl. If there's nothing she loves more than that, I wonder how she lives in such an overstimulated society.

I also wonder if she's going to ask her mom why she's married to a guy who blames 9/11 on Bill Clinton.

Journophrenia: How to Contradict Yourself

Yesterday the New York Post, a proletarian tabloid newspaper, ran a catchy headline which read, or rather shrieked: "'BLAME U.S. FOR 9/11' IDIOTS IN MAJORITY -- 'PLOTS' THICKEN IN SHOCKING POLL"

The subsequent article said in part, "Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found."

The headline was, I think, obviously a teaser deliberately meant to give a false impression. A lot of readers, like myself, expected to see a story about a majority of Americans credulously believing the Bush administration perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. This impression is conveyed by the word "PLOTS."

However, the article doesn't even go there, and deals instead not with suspicions of "plots," but with mundane beliefs which also happen to be true. The "idiots" the headline speaks of are people who happen to remember that Bush received a Daily Presidential Briefing on August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US.” It warned of “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,” particularly targeted at New York.

Anybody else remember that from the 9/11 Commission hearings? Sure you do.

There were other warnings as well, as detailed by this article at Think Progress, and these also were revealed during the nationally-televised 9/11 Commission hearings.

And I alsmost forgot...there was also the headline you see above in...GUESS WHO?...the New York Post in May of 2002.

Yeah, I know, that was a long time ago.

Thanks, as usual, to Atrios.

Law Norder

Fred Thompson, aka Frederick of Hollywood, says Fox News don't like him and are picking on him and he don't like it. Read the details and see the video here.

It's pretty obvious that Rupert Murdoch has passed the word along to the errand boys and bims who do his imperial bidding ("fair and balanced?" They forgot "independent.") that the candidate Fox News supports is that great statesman and hero of 9/11, Publius Assholius Giulianius.

Obvious Solutions of the Doh! Kind

If we don't cut our gasoline consumption at least in half over the next five years, we're nuts. And I don't mean figuratively nuts.

Here's an interesting little story about record oil prices that ran in USA Today a couple days ago. I'm not sure what it proves, but I plan to use it as evidence to argue that economists are the dumbest people on earth, with maybe a couple possible exceptions.

"The price of oil again set a record Tuesday, easily blowing through the previous high earlier this month," says the McPaper, "in a move some analysts said was absurd because there was no solid, supply-and-demand reason for it. 'Very overdone,' commented Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wachovia.

"'Fundamental reasons? I don't see any,' said James Williams, economist at WTRG Economics."

WTRG.com, incidentally, is the best and most up-to-date source for information on all things petroleum.

I'm not even going to go into what people like Mark Vitner and James Williams are missing. I've noticed that economists as a class are prone to cranial-rectal syndrome, and that the price of oil has been trending upward since 1998, and that it's not going to ever go back down significantly, for reasons Messrs. Vitner and Williams just don't understand, even though petroleum geologists like Kenneth Deffeyes have been telling us for years now that the age of cheap oil is over.

Long story short -- this is terrible. A fill-up that used to cost twenty bucks now costs sixty. Add to that the inconvenient truth that burning all this fossil fuel is making life on earth unlivable, and it's terrible times two.

What are we going to do about it? That's simple! The answer is staring us right in the face, although most of us refuse to see it and few people are talking about it. But here's a hint: what do fat people do when they want to lose weight?

I'll say it again: if we don't cut our gasoline consumption at least in half over the next five years, we're nuts. And I don't mean figuratively nuts.

Really, it shouldn't be that hard. All it would require is a little planning, fewer trips, fewer cars. A good place to start would be to abolish the standard that says in every household, there is one car for every adult member of the household. That always seemed a little extreme to me anyway.

And if you've got one of those big-ass SUV's, get rid of it. You really can't afford it any more anyway, unless you're a Republican.

I know, I know, some people are going to say, "But I LIKE my SUV." Yeah, yeah, such are the problems of the rich and privileged. Now here's the latest news: you're not as rich as you used to be.

Dead Catfish Blues

Unless things are a lot better than I think they are, I won't be posting here for the next few days. It's because we're having a major power outage in the park where I live.

Something called a "transformer" blew up (I heard it) which caused the "main station" inside the park to catch fire, and a bunch of main wires got "fried," they're still trying to figure out how far down the line. So I'm guessing maybe a week. That may seem a long time, but tempus fugit.

Ancient Wisdom

The perpetual war has a dual objective. Besides establishing and maintaining an empire and controlling the world's most important resources. The chefs who cooked up this war also aim to keep the citizens of the home country impoverished, indebted, and desperate, otherwise those citizens might have the leisure to inform themselves about what's being done to them, and why. In addition, channeling most of the country's resources into the endless war also makes it easier to keep the citizenry in a state of frightened, ignorant, homicidal fanaticism.

That last part hasn't worked out so well, though. Polls show that more and more American citizens as time goes by are recognizing that they are being robbed to feed a war machine that is weakening the country, not making it stronger.

There was a time when the anti-war message was delivered by people in very high places. Guess who said this?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

That was a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who was also the supreme commander of allied forces at the D-Day landing and invasion of Europe in 1944. He was speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953.

Things Fall Apart

Most marriages don't last forever. For better or for worse, there was a time not so long ago when most did, except those that ended prematurely because somebody died.

A recent Associated Press feature story called attention to rising levels of child abuse in America, and the corresponding rise in households where a parent and another adult -- the new spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend -- are living with children.

"(M)any scholars and front-line caseworkers interviewed by The Associated Press see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a broader trend that deeply worries them" writes AP's David Crary. "They note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures.

"'This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation,' said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. 'Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, "What's the harm?" The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children.'"

Is there something wrong with people today that's keeping us from staying married? Or are marriage and the nuclear family institutions that we stubbornly and somewhat desperately cling to, insisting they will retain their old forms in spite of the changed social conditions that make family life as it once was immensely difficult if not impossible?

Most of us are conservative by nature, that is, conservative in our subconscious and instinctive selves, and we try to hang on to familiar and traditional social forms and functions for the security we expect them to provide. But when we look at marriage today, or typically fractured, cobbled-together families, or contemporary versions of an evangelical religion that once gave us workable codes of behavior and conduct, we're seeing the ghosts of those institutions that once provided social cohesion, but are now a source of social dysfunction; we see the shadows of forgotten ancestors in the hollowed out, lifeless conventions of a gone world.

It's the old meanings that are fading away, and the new ones are not yet in focus. But out of the struggle to save life on earth and end the universal reign of terror by the masters of war, we'll get new ways of organizing society, new tribes and clans, a new rubric for morality, and new meanings.

But only if we win the struggle.

Effete Snob and Proud of It

Writing on the Wall Street Urinal's op-ed page this past Wednesday, Peter Berkowitz, one of the regular contributing parrots at that forum which has become one of the administration's echo chambers, took as his thesis that "Bush hatred" is a sign of "insanity." At one point in this meaningless bundle of generalizations, Berkowitz sniffs, "Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition."

Berkowitz is particularly well qualified to lift his leg against people he considers "intellectuals." He's a paid shil for the Israel lobby and one of the administration's (and now one of Giuliani's) foreign policy bobbleheads. He sued Harvard when they refused to grant him tenure, and since he couldn't get the academic position he wanted, decided instead to become a whore and mouthpiece for a corrupt, violent, and sadistic political regime.

He's also a perfect example of the kind of disgusting creeps that crawl out from under various rocks whenever fascists are in charge. "Intellectuals" are always persona non grata among political troglodytes, who fear and despise anyone who knows more than they do.

Neither George W. Bush nor most establishment politicians can read this blog. The majority of public school administrators couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

And if you voted for Bush, or think the Iraq War is groovy, if you like NASCAR, if The Outback restaurant is your idea of gourmet eating, or if your wife's hairdo was ever ruined by a ceiling fan, this is not the place for you.

War's Over Let's Go Home

The House just passed a $50 bil appropriations bill for the Iraq War, but it's got conditions attached. In order for the money to be disbursed, Bush will have to start pulling troops out during the next few weeks, and schedule combat to end by December 2008.

It probably won't pass in the Senate, and Bush says he'll veto it if it ends up on his desk in any case. But at the same time, Harry Reid says there won't be any more war appropriations bills without a withdrawal plan attached to them. The days of "OK, you win; here's the money" are over.

I guess that with exactly a year to go before the general election, the Democrats have finally decided they need to do something to prove to voters that they're not a bunch of cowering, quivering egg-sucking hounds.

In other news, violence in Iraq has subsided in the past few weeks. There are fewer suicide bombings, and a General James Simmons announced this morning that there were only 1560 roadside bombs found or exploded in October (imagine that -- only 1560), as opposed to twice that many last March.

Commenting that Iran's commitments to stem the flow of weapons and explosives into Iraq "appear to be holding up," Simmons added that bombs being found now appear to have entered the country months ago. He didn't say how he could tell by looking at a bomb when it arrived in country, and neglected to mention that nobody has ever proved that Iran is exporting weapons to Iraq, but oh well...

So let's do this. Let's say the surge worked, and that's why violence in Iraq has subsided. Let's say the contending sects and ethnicities have decided to work with each other rather than kill each other. Saddam is dead, and the country has a government that was chosen in an election. So let's say we won, and close down that dinosaur of an embassy in Baghdad and bring all our people home.

We can have a big victory parade down Fifth Avenue and celebrate. We'll all fly the flag at backyard barbecues, and eat barf on a stick and barbecue the neighbor's cat.

I just hope Reid and Nancy Pelosi are good for what they've promised -- no more war appropriations unless they're contingent on a withdrawal plan and schedule -- because if they weenie out on us again, the war will continue for reasons I utterly don't understand. Even though we've won.

Imus Returns

The market research I've been doing today indicates that very few people are interested in the possibility of nuclear incineration or the Pakistani military's thriving trade in nuclear expertise, software, and hardware, so let's move on to more important subjects. And yes, it's no longer a rumor. Don Imus is soon returning to the airwaves.

After an eight-month involuntary vacation, Imus and his merry band will be working his usual a.m. drive-time slot on WABC-AM in New York City, starting December 3. The extent of his radio syndication is, of course, a work in progress, and the teevee simulcast will be on an up-till-now small cable channel, RFD (Rural Free Delivery) which currently reaches about 30 million homes.

Imus is a study in narcissism. While the supposed topic of his rants and interviews is current events, it's really all about him, and he keeps a stable of politicians and pundits who are willing to kiss up to him in return for air time and exposure for their careers and books. These include politicians like Joe Lieberman, Harold Ford, Jr., and John McCain, and even some pretty reputable pundits such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and the New York Times's Frank Rich.

Apparently Imus's Amen Charlie and sidekick newscaster Charles McChord will be accompanying the I-hole's return, but there is no word on whether the racist and fascist producer, Bernard McGuirk, who was the source of much of Imus's troubles, will be on board.

All the gory details are at Alternet.

Ugh!

If you look at which party the most Americans say represent them at Pollingreport.com, you'd think the next presidential election would be a stroll in the park for the Democrats. Exactly half of all voters say they're Democrats. Only 35 percent identify as Republicans, and the remaining 15 percent are other/unsures, or in other words independents.

But election predictions based on those statistics would be seriously flawed. In head-to-head polling, Clinton tops Giuliani by only one percentage point -- 46 to 45, with fully five percent saying they wouldn't vote for either one.

46 To 45 is within the margin of error. The Hillaryphobia of the American electorate is stalking the Democratic Party like a relentless zombie. I'd suggest the party eleders need to do something to head off disaster.

This is all very important, because some time when we were asleep or distracted by Teri Schiavo or Lindsay Lohan or something, the Constitution was put into cold storage, and the American government became synonymous with the administration. So any more the president, along with his or her cabinet and close advisors, the intelligence services, and the military are the actual government.

The presidential election is now the only one that mattes. Others -- representatives, senators, Supreme Court justices, are in the picture, but their tiny portraits are clustered around the big heads of the important adminstration figures like so many decorative small potatoes.

Incidentally, I'm with the five percent who will vote for someone else. In fact, that's probably who I'll write in -- "Someone Else." Either that or I'll go with the protagonist of Mike Judge's great political/cultural satirical movie, "Idiocracy:" -- "Not Sure."

Cyberspace Junk

"On Christmas Eve," said Norad,
"A soviet Sputnik hit Africa,
India,
Venezuela,
Texass,
Kansass,
It's coming fast --
Peru too --
It keeps coming..."
And now I'm mad about
Space Junk
I'm all burned out about
Space Junk
Ooh walk and talk about
Space Junk
It smashed my baby's head,
And now my Sally's dead.

--Devo
"Space Junk"

Devo sang about Space Junk 30 years ago, and the last time anybody checked it hadn't gone away. It's now been joined by cyberspace junk -- discontinued blogs and aborted blogs, which litter the internets like so many defunct Telstar satellites.

Nobody knows how many active blogs there are in the world. I'd guess a couple million. But for every active, currently living blog, I'll bet there are ten or fifteen that were launched, kept up for a long or short time, and then abandoned to sit forever at April 28, 2004, forgotten by the proprieter and only visited accidentally by surfers committing unconscious typos.

Even more numerous are the aborted blogs. These were attempts to set up blogs by people who either didn't know what they were doing or were convinced by someone or something that they should try doing this blog thing, but lacked any enthusiasm for it. The result is a vast archaeological stratum of blogs with names and proprietors but no posting history, or maybe one experimental post and after that, nothing. Since 2002.

Some of these have interesting, even fascinating names. For example, how did Hogofogo arrive at that title for his blog and online identity? Did he or she know that Hogofogo was the name of the villain in the 1964 Czech western "Limonadovy Joe" (Lemonade Joe)? Lemonade Joe, by the way, is an extremely subtle piece of work, and I wonder if the blog proprietor appreciates its delicate and careful satirization of both communism and monopoly capitalism. But no matter, since the blog Hogofogo is now suspended lifelessly and indefinitely in the cyber ether.

Hogofogo survived for one post: a test message entitled "Testovaci," followed by the text, "adsfadsdsfadsfsfa" in two colors. And that is the last we will ever hear from Mr. or Ms. Hogofogo.

The blog Briney didn't even get that far. It only progressed as far as having a title and a proprieter (Ex_pat) before expiring at a date impossible to determine. I have a feeling that Ex_pat may have been a teenager or young twenty-something attempting to launch a blog called "Britney" (the sphere is full of stunningly original ideas), and that if he or she had spelled the name correctly, would have found out that the name is already taken. Or maybe she wanted the name "Briney." In either case, it's a shame the project was aborted, and I'm sorry the name is taken and consigned to permanent dormancy. The Briney Blogspot would be a great name for a blog.

¡Mon Noxin

Didn't have a topic to write about today, so I put up this nice picture of President Drahcir W. Noxin.

I remember him almost fondly these days, probably because I've been feeling nostalgic lately. His antics seem almost quaint and droll compared to what's going on now, even though he was a war criminal, like the present crew.

President Noxin was one of the biggest phonies who ever lived. Since he was always trying to act like somebody else he was painfully ill at ease and awkward. In contrast, George W. Bush is down to earth and genuine.

Back then I laboured at the aerospace manufacturing plant, where we all worked disharmoniously at making fuel flow guages for jet airplanes. Bowling was important in those beery, hazy, nicotine-drenched days, and so was Monday Night Football, romance, music, and marijuana. We didn't have much, but it didn't take much. We went wherever we wanted on leaded, 30-cent a gallon gasoline. Vegetables were cheap, we smoked a lot, and the good times rolled.

Come back, President Drahcir W. Noxin.

The Fifth Sutra

There by the wayside they met an old man with bent frame, wrinkled face and sorrowful brow, and the prince asked the charioteer: "Who is this? His head is white, his eyes are bleared, and his body is withered. He can barely support himself on his staff."

The charioteer, much embarrassed, hardly dared speak the truth. He said: "These are the symptoms of old age. This same man was once a suckling child, and as a youth full of sportive life; but now, as years have passed away, his beauty is gone and the strength of his life is wasted."

Siddhartha was greatly affected by the words of the charioteer, and he sighed because of the pain of old age. "What joy or pleasure can people take," he thought to himself, "when they know they must soon wither and pine away?"

This past year I've been up to my ass in alligators, contending with divorce, prying my body loose from a vicious addiction, and aging, along with everything aging entails for a male of our uniquely blessed and cursed species.

Divorce is ugly, even when it's fairly congenial and doesn't involve lawyers, fighting over children, and revenge. I'd rather have a broken leg than a broken heart. The pain hangs around like an untreatable illness, and there's no cure other than time.

Likewise, the pain of narcotic withdrawal is remarkably persistent. The drug seems to have a mind of its own, like a sentient monster, which is why AA describes alcohol as "cunning, baffling, powerful."

About the only good thing to say about divorce and kicking an addiction is the old saw that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That, and the fact that for most of us, such things are simply trials to be got through, and eventually they're over.

Aging, as afflictions go, is the one that has real possibilities for positive outcomes. Of course, it ends in death, which certainly isn't amenable to a positive interpretation no matter how you spin it. But along the way, a person might be able to draw closer to some kind of perception of an ultimate truth. The cessation of desire, the end of ambition and striving, the death of any need to prove oneself -- all these things lead to enhanced possibilities, or even the probability of more accurate reflection than youth is capable of. And if fear could be banished, along with the rest of the stuff I mentioned, just think of where the mind -- all of it, conscious and unconscious -- might be able to go.

As the poet Bob Dylan sang, Yet I swear I see my reflection/So very high above this wall ("I Shall Be Released").

Twilight of the Dinosaurs

The neocon wing of the Republican Party used to be the headquarters of the American political system, but thanks to the disasters of the last seven years it's now become the hindquarters.

That's one bit of good news, and here's another: the American people are mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more.

Now here's the bad news: Most of the Democrats on the national scene are NOT mad as hell. And they'll take "it" indefinitely. They say they're willing to bend over backwards to work with the Republicans in Congress.

Bend over frontwards is more like it, if you ask me.

Paul Krugman attempts to explain what all this might possibly mean in a thoughtful NY Times op-ed that ran this past Monday. [url]http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110607O.shtml[/url]

Among other significant factoids, Krugman cites results uncovered by liberal surveyers who sampled the 75 percent or so of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track, to find out what specific political or economic symptoms they found most troubling. They discovered it's not just about Iraq any more, although that's still a major concern. "The most commonly voiced complaints among the dissatisfied are 'Big businesses get whatever they want in Washington' and 'Leaders have forgotten the middle class,'" Krugman reports.

And currently it's their dependency on big business and big donors, not the Republicans, that is the biggest threat to the Democratic Party.

"The most conspicuous example of this influence right now is the way Senate Democrats are dithering over whether to close the hedge fund tax loophole - which allows executives at private equity firms and hedge funds to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent on most of their income," Krugman wrote.

"Only a handful of very wealthy people benefit from this loophole, while closing the loophole would yield billions of dollars each year in revenue. Retrieving this revenue is a key ingredient in legislation approved by the House Ways and Means Committee to reform the alternative minimum tax, something that must be done to avoid a de facto tax increase for millions of middle-class Americans.

"A handful of superwealthy hedge fund managers versus millions of middle-class Americans - it sounds like a no-brainer." is Krugman's conclusion.

It is a no-brainer. And I'd say the Democrats, after having pissed away the last year, had better figure out who they represent, and that they've only got a few more months to get a clue.

I predict they won't, and that before too long the "moderate" Democrats will join the neocon wing of the Republican Party in the extinct species wings of natural history museums.

"So, how wobbled (by corporate money) are today's Democrats?" Krugman asks in conclusion. "I guess we'll find out."

I think I already know, and I see a split in the party coming. This, of course, will make Republicans' eyes light up. "Goody," they'll say.

Let 'em think that. The history of American politics is full of sharp and sudden changes of direction that were total surprises to the people living then, and that the backward-looking conservatives of earlier times never saw coming.

Hot Gas in Crack

OK, so the blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) is watching CNBC, and there are a couple items going by on that crawler-thingy they have running at the bottom of the screen. Those things often say just flat-out weird stuff, especially on business channels.

Today, as reported by Atrios, it said, "Hot Gas in Crack," and "the Gasoline Crack Spread Trade." I'm not even going to tell you what kind of pictures stuff like this conjures up in my mind.

I'm afraid I just don't understand business and economics sometimes.

Thanks for Nothing, Henry

Here's a nifty little illustration of the fundamental truth observed over 2,500 years ago by the Buddha that all actions have consequences. Following trains of consequences is a little like a game of follow the string. In this particular case, the string ends with what that old CIA hand Chalmers Johnson would call "The Sorrows of Empire."

1. Early in the last century, Henry Ford perfected the technique of assembly-line manufacturing and made the personal automobile affordable for everyone in America who wasn't dirt poor.

2. For the first 30 years or so of the age of easy motoring (1920's--1950's) we were able to supply all the gasoline that all those cars needed from domestic oil supplies. But as time went on there were more and more cars, and domestic oil production peaked in 1970, and has been declining ever since, never to return to its former levels. We became dependent on imported oil to keep the wheels turning.

3. Manufacturers could have made other kinds of cars besides gas buggies. The technology needed to make electric cars, for example, has existed from the earliest days of automotive development. But too many people (auto makers, oil companies, tire manufacturers) were making too much money to permit a disturbance in the status quo.

4. A large part of the foreign oil upon which we have become dependent comes from the Middle East, a region whose people, as time went on, developed a growing antipathy toward us, and began to hate our attitude toward them, their religion, their demands for sovereignty, and especially their petroleum resources.

5. We found it necessary to establish a global empire, primarily to control the exploitation and flow of petroleum resources.

6. To maintain the empire we needed allies in the Middle East and elsewhere, and even though the government of the U.S. has paid lip service to the ideals of democracy and freedom, we have been undiscriminating in our choice of allies. Many of them are and have been brutal military dictators who stop at nothing to maintain their own power and enormous wealth. Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah of Iran, the Somoza clan, Papa Doc Duvalier...the list goes on and on.

7. We have lavished these erstwhile allies and "lovers of democracy" with money and weapons, and in one particularly inauspicious case, with the means to acquire nuclear weapons.

8. Now we're in a bad spot. The dictator Musharaff is going to fall in Pakistan, a pseudo-nation cobbled together from remanants of India just a few decades ago, and one of the most volatile and divided societies on earth. Whoever inherits Musharraf's government will inherit his impressive nuclear weapons along with the modern means (thanks to our generosity) of delivering those weapons.

9. Musharraf's inheritance very well may be passed to militant Islamists.

As Hardy used to say to Laurel, "This is another fine mess you've gotten us into." Thanks for nothing, Henry Ford.

If Bush and Cheney end up with their fat tits in the wringer in Pakistan and the larger Middle East, it serves them right. "You got what you wanted, assholes." is what I'll have to say about it. "You got an empire, and you got the consequence of empire, which is that inevitably you're going to make a lot of new enemies."

The problem is, the rest of us are in the same pot of soup they're in.

Nice job, guys. What are you planning to screw up tomorrow?

Neanderthalosophy Scribble Contest

Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly is running an "All Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest." There are 14 entries total, so judging fairly would require a lot of reading, and I'm not sure I'm up for perusing such a huge volume of right-wing dribbling.

So far I've only read one entry: Kim du Toit's "The Pussification of the American Male," and it's definitely worth sharing. This du Toit character actually writes rather well, if you don't have any objections to the word "fuck."

His "Pussification" essay is also a long sucker, so be sure you have your reading glasses.

My favorite excerpt from this very long, very funny rant is: "You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? 'Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.'

"Real men, on the other hand, have big fucking mean-ass dogs: Rhodesian ridgebacks, bull terriers and Rottweilers, or else working dogs like pointers or retrievers which go hunting with them and slobber all over the furniture.

"Women own lapdogs. "

I never know whether it's self-mockery or serious when these macho guys get into one of these tirades about what "real men" say and do. Du Toit also notes that "real men" by definition enjoy getting sloppy drunk once in a while, smoke cigars, enjoy watching loud, overpowered cars going round and round an oval track, and like to leave their smelly underdrawers lying around the house. He pointedly omits discussing whether "real men" are supposed to give the old lady a mouth full of fist if she gets out of line.

I'm so impressed with Drum's selections I don't know what to read next. Should I choose Glenn Reynolds's "Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a 'quagmire' were wrong....Nah," or John Hinderaker's "It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius...."

Yee-haw, and duh.

To a Newcomer

Welcome to the US Politics board. I'm glad to see new people here, but I have to disagree with your estimation of our little community. If you jump into enough threads, you'll soon see that even though we have our share of partisans, there are plenty of people here who are thoroughly disgusted with business as usual.

However, among those who realize that the two-party system has degenerated, and is now a parked car that's out of gas, there is little agreement about what comes next, or what should. So those of us who are disaffected are not a group, like the Demosellouts and Repubuffoons.

You speak of real reform, but I wonder what you mean by that, exactly. Are you talking about reform, or revolution?

My own feeling is that momentous change has already begun. It's apparent In rocketing oil prices and the collapsing dollar, and in the debts that we individually and collectively will someday fail to honor. We're seeing the beginning of the fall of the Global Corporate Order. The two main political parties are both dependent on the order, so they will fall along with it. But what happens as "the way things are" slowly dissolves is anybody's guess.

Competent and dynamic leaders could steer us in the right direction -- or in the disastrously wrong direction. What I have in mind is the revolution begun by Gandhi, and the revolt enabled by Martin Luther King.

But then I remind myself that both Gandhi and King watched horrified as the movements they started spun out of their control, gathered intensity, and took violent and radically separatist directions. A revolution is not something to be undertaken lightly!

On the other hand, when it's time -- and it's certainly time in this country right now -- a revolution or wholesale reformation is impossible to avoid. I believe we'll soon see the dissolution of the current political system, followed by a new national political orientation, and that this will follow our economic crises, collapse, and reconstitution exactly the same way the wheels of a wagon follow the horse that pulls it along.

When I listen to the ridiculous and pathetic posturing of people like Clinton, Obama, Giuliani, and Mitt Romney, I'm more convinced than ever that these clowns of the political circus have absolutely nothing to offer in the way of solutions, and in fact have no comprehension of the crisis that is even now upon us. They're turning into fossilized remains before our eyes, the remains of a gone world, and have already been consigned to what Leon Trotsky called the garbage can of history.

Soon-to-be-Forgotten Idea

Fausto, the proprietor of "the Socinian" (a blog not unlike this one in that its readership is limited, but very different in content) and a friend of mine has an idea that, while not exactly what you would call a great notion, is worth checking out.

Makes about as much sense as rapping for Jesus.

A Diet for Recovery

"Recovery from what?" you may ask. "Of a couple things simultaneously," I answer. Here are a few modest, reasonable, and non-traumatic dietary changes I've made recently in my own life which I hope will increase my chances of personal recovery from disease and addiction. Others might want to consider them also, because these kinds of changes (not these exact changes necessarily), if adopted by large numbers of Americans, might ease some of the pressure of human demands on Mother Earth.

I've cut the number of eggs I consume in half -- eggs and toast for breakfast every other day. Raisin bran with two percent milk is the alternative.

No more butter; hummus instead.

Cheese and bread a couple times a week rather than every day. Mayonnaise is out, replaced by a health food store product called Vegenaise, which tastes wonderful and is exactly what it sounds like. Pizza, which used to be the default meal, and is now banished from the table.

No beef, no pork. Chicken and fish are okay, but I find myself eating each of those about once a week at this point.

For years I've been vitamin deficient from not eating enough produce and avoiding raw food altogether. I'm eating more cooked produce now, and one of the most important items in the new diet is the daily orange.

Approximately four nights a week I have brown rice cooked with a combination of three or four of any of the following: pinto beans, broccoli, bean sprouts, spinach, cashews, mushrooms, carrots, frozen peas, seaweed, celery, or lentils. Top with soy sauce and chow mein noodles, or skip the noodles if you're a gluten-free person.

Yogurt for dessert.

Others adopting such a regimen may feel differently, but for some reason I don't feel like this involves any sacrifice on my part. Maybe that's because the most important and least healthful item in my diet is still my Big Enchilada, joy, crutch, and ever-faithful true love: big, strong, bolshy tasses of hot black coffee.

Ah.

Sleepwalk

We've been sleepwalking into the future for years. Now the future is here. Crude oil closed at $91.86 on Friday. A month from now it'll close at $101.86. Welcome to the future; do yourself a favor and check your favorite fantasies and delusional behaviors at the door.

So today as my cigarette habit sets noisily in the west, I'm doing a little sleeptalking to myself. I know the routine so well I don't have to be awake to recite it. The Revolution will be televised. Forget Lenin and Robespierre. The foundations of Empire will soon be demolished to powder by organic carrots and armies of pacifist mystical chanting Buddhist vegetarians.

Americans are still dreaming that they'll be able to keep their insolent chariots running somehow -- on biodiesel, or electricity, or hydrogen, or French-fry grease. Meanwhile, Paris (France, not Texas) has begun to free itself from the embrace of the four-cylinder dinosaurs and rediscovered the bicycle, with the most progressive city in the U.S., Portland (Oregon, not Maine) soon to follow. As in so many other facets of the current economy, the past is the future.

Meanwhile, the numbers of house foreclosures set new records in September. They'll set new, and unprecedented ones in January, February, and March of next year. Real estate prices are going to drop anywhere from 50 to 95 percent in the next 40 months or so, depending on whether the property in question is viable (i.e., fairly close-in to a center of commerce and within reach of public transportation) or some loser McMansion in the farthest distant reaches of Slurbia. Those will end up abandoned, the yards turned into weedy jungles and the green swimming pools breeding mosquitos, and unsellable at any price. The cost of gasoline and heating oil and electricity will see to that.

It's nice to know that the gangsta lendahs who victimized the gullible during the first half of the decade, the Countrywides and the DiTechs, are losing their butts, but the problem is the collapse of the finance "industry" hurts a lot of us little guys too. This is certainly a very bad time to be in debt, and the more debt, the more trouble, for as the value of the dollar weakens against other currencies, debtors will be forced to repay expensive dollars with cheap ones.

But what it all means for people who have more assets than liabilities is hard to say. I don't really understand the dismal science of economics all that well, and a lot of what I read seems self-contradictory. However, another non-economist like myself, Manuel Garcia, provides an interesting look at future possibilities with his Counterpunch.org article called "Homes of the Crash Test Dummies."

Obviously the prices of some things are going to rise astronomically -- gasoline and all other forms of energy especially, but also stuff like insurance. The cost of other things, such as housing and a lot of consumer items such as furniture will fall rapidly. Hundreds of thousands of construction workers are or soon will be out of jobs, but on the other hand our now-arrived future will provide a tremendous market for people who know how to repair things.

Food is the most interesting and unpredictable commodity, because local farmers' markets and food cooperatives will start to come into play, and begin to elbow out the Safeways and Winn-Dixies, purveyors of our current diet of overpriced, overprocessed agribusiness stuff. But nobody knows how much influence alternative, local sources of food will have, or how quickly they'll come into their own.

Health care for the masses is a gigantic question mark.

It seems to me we're entering a sea-change as or more significant than the Great Depression, and that the economic crisis whose beginnings are now upon us will accomplish what decades of revolutionary rhetoric couldn't -- an end to our various war machines and their incessant wars, on Iraq, on Iran, on terror, on drugs, and mostly on common sense and sanity.

*&$#@!?

OK, I think we've got a good working definition of insanity here.

The facts are simple: Nancy Pelosi traveled to Syria, and wore a head scarf while visiting the 8th-century Omayyad Mosque.

Whether or not you think Pelosi shold have visited Syria, the head scarf thing was a simple act of deference and respect when visiting someone else's house, sort of like a male gentile wearing a yarmulke when he visits a synagogue. But Matt Drudge's indignant report on the event didn't see it that way. One does not defer to them Mooslim A-Rabs, and respect is out of the question. It was most likely a commenter at Drudge's blog (the source is unclear) who responded that Pelosi was "donning the garb of America’s enemies," then asked "What’s next — a suicide bomber belt?"

You wanna know what nuts looks like? It looks like that.

To make the vast leap from a head scarf, a simple act of respect, to a suicide bomber belt, the most inflammatory and extreme talisman of the committed violent sectarian, at once lumps all Muslims and all Arabs together, and lumps Pelosi, who rightly or wrongly was making a simple fact-finding diplomatic mission in with them. It betrays a disconnect from reality, a level of hysteria, and a "kill-em-all" mentality that makes rational discourse with such a person impossible.

But by far, the best example of wild-eyed screaming yellow balls-to-the-wall moonbat wingnut stark raving craziness I've seen, ever, is provided by a recent essay by Philip Atkinson, "Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy." where you'll find this sage advice about how Atkinson believes George Bush should have conducted the beginning of the Iraq War:

"The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life."

Until they were all dead?

Hey, what's the big deal about a little genocide when you're God's chosen people, and the biggest, baddest son of a bitch in this or any other valley?

Enough said.

In 1957 the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung wrote that "For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors," and added that "They are...despite their small number in comparion with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection..."

The infection Jung speaks of is bound to spread, of course, if a group of these "latent cases" manages to capture the highest offices of government. The result is that mass craziness breaks loose, such as for example, large numbers of Californians in recent days whispering among themselves that the state's recent wildfires must have been caused by "the terrorists."

God save us. Nobody else can.

On Strike?

From the Associated Press:

The preznit is saying Congress has "set a record they should not be proud of: October 26 is the latest date in 20 years that Congress has failed to get a single annual appropriations bill to the president's desk."

So I'm sitting here wondering, is this just the usual incompetence and inability of our corrupt and indifferent Congress to function properly, or have they come up with some sort of secret plan?

Shutting down the legislature and going on strike might be a way to bring the preznit to his senses on issues such as the war in Iraq, making war on Iran, health care, and bunches of other stuff. This is assuming, of course, that he has any sense.

The story goes on to report that the preznit "chided Congress for failing to approve more money for Iraq and Afghanistan."

Come on, Harry and Nancy, wake up!!! Failing to approve more money for Iraq and Afghanistan is a GREAT PLAN. You guys are like clocks that have stopped and are still right twice a day. You can't help but do the right thing by accident sometimes. And I would strongly encourage you to "fail) to get a single annual appropriations bill to the president's desk" indefinitely.

Among the Ruins

Historians everywhere will one day try to pinpoint the exact moment the United States passed over the frontier separating Constitutional democracy from military dictatorship. It won't be easy. It's fashionable today to blame George W. Bush, and it's true that his wars, tortures, and domestic spying, all of them illegal because they're imperial, are an executive coup of sorts.

But accretion of power to the executive at Congress's expense has been going on since Roosevelt's depression-era "alphabet" economic initiatiatives were cooked up in the White House and hastily approved by a subservient legislature. Truman oversaw the beginnings of the enormous expansion of the military, or rather its refusal to ever completely demobilize at the end of World War II, as well as approving the creation of the CIA, a private army beholden only to the executive. By the time Eisenhower warned us of the growth of "the military-industrial complex," the war machine in all its illegitimacy and illegality was already the leading branch of government.

Obviously, neither the republic nor democracy are going to be restored. It's too late for that. But there remains a question of whether Congress must accept its current state of enfeeblement and total impotence, or whether its members might be able to exert themselves sufficiently to regain enough influence to at least partially check the dictatorship.

A test of this question is at hand, as the dictatorship is attempting to force Congress to endorse the administration's desire for retroactive immunity from prosecution for the telecommunications companies it forced to engage in domestic spying. Domestic spying is, of course strictly illegal, and if Congress caves in on this issue, it's as good as approving the idea that the rule of law is an antiquated concept, and that the president of these United States is now a monarch who is a law unto himself.

One U.S. Senator, Chris Dodd of Connecticut (also a presidential candidate, but an irrelevant one), is determined to stop this push for retroactive immunity for telecoms who have violated the law. He would ideally like to see this proposal never get out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Currently, one committee member favors granting immunity, two are opposed, and 16 are sitting on the fence. To find out who's who, and to see how you can influence the resolution of this extremely important constitutional issue, visit http://chrisdodd.com/immunity.

How to Get a Clue

Thanks largely to the strenuous efforts of our corporate-financed mass media, the American public has now become so fucking clueless that it sets new, daily records in its ever-increasing levels of cluelessitude. Sort of like the price of crude oil.

With an assist from the teevee nooze, we the people set a new benchmark for willful ignorance last week, and one that took us waaay off the charts. For as the price of crude oil briefly topped $90 and the stock markets melted down last Friday, the talking heads continued to chatter about the agonies and ecstasies of His Gayness, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, and the underpantslessness of Britney Spears. You know, important stuff we need to know about.

The corporate media's criminal malfeasance and nonfeasance in these matters is duly noted in Jim Kunstler's coverage of last week's Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas meeting at their annual get-together in Houston. It's new today on his Clusterfuck Nation blog, and it begins with an overview of the conference's host city, Houston, a place I've personally never been to, and I earnestly hope never to go.

Highlights of the conference included a presentation by Robert Hirsch, described by Kunstler as a "co-author of the now-famous 2005 Hirsch Report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, which, much to the consternation of its sponsor, first told the nation in no uncertain terms that it was heading for a catastrophic set of disruptions in 'normal' American life if we heedlessly continued energy business-as-usual."

And of course, what we've done since 2005 is heedlessly continue energy business-as-usual.

Hirsch told the APSO conference attendees that things are now worse than he originally thought, and he predicts "a future of 'oil export withholding,' panicked markets, and allocation disturbances that would make the 1973 OPEC embargo look like a golden age."

Another speaker was Matt Simmons, an investment banker specializing in oil industry finance, who analyzes the industry from the "futures" point of view. Simmons is certain that "market allocation problems in the near future (will) almost certainly induce 'hoarding behavior' among the public that (will) cripple the economy, lead to enforced rationing, and shock the nation."

And so it went, with speaker after speaker delivering more bad news which, incidentally, the corporate media will never share with a public who doesn't want to hear it.

I'd strongly encourage anyone who's interested in personal survival in a state other than total impoverishment to read Kunstler this morning, and to turn off the television. It's now virtually impossible to get any real, useful information from the box, which was never anything more than a platform for corporate advertising anyway.

The news that you won't hear on teevee is that this country is living like a methamphetamine addict who refuses to acknowledge his illness and doesn't believe he can actually die, but at the same time holds the thought somewhere in his mind that if he should die, he wants to do so with a full load of happy dust in his brain.

The Cheney administration's solution to this, of course, is to bomb another Middle Eastern country with four letters in its name. So if you'd like to die a slow, painful, agonizing death, vote Republican.

There are solutions to our energy crisis, a crisis which no longer lies in the future but is here now. But all of them are hard, and all of them require sacrifice and self-denial and the breaking of an addiction. There is not a single solution to these difficulties that doesn't necessitate the end of the age of happy motoring as we've known it.

Oh, I Soooooo Don't Care I'm About to Faint

Over on the Beliefnet U.S. Politics board, about half the threads on the front page are now Limbaugh threads. First there were half dozen or so har-har-har chest thumpers about the Harry Reid anti-Rush letter the dittoheads auctioned off on E-Bay in a frenzy of mutual masturbation, followed by a couple of anti-Limbaugh scrolls, most notably couldntgetjustscott's "Lies" thread, which provided an amusing and necessary laxative to the congested proceedings over there.

But I must say, I care about Rush Limbaugh and the moonbats who take him seriously about as much as I care about the South Beach Diet, or NASCAR, or owning a 5,000-square-foot home with a swimming pool, or the World Wrestling Federation, or who's going to win on "Dancing with the Stars," or Pray-er in our Skew-els, or Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS, or going shopping at Wal-Mart, or pimped-out pick-em-up trucks, or wearing a Rolex watch, or...or...or...

Maybe I should care about him more, since I understand he's very influential. I even know a couple of people who reverently listen to him, but my attitude toward that is to pity the less fortunate.

And until the political situation reaches the point in this country where I suspect the dittoheads have enough power to lock up everybody who knows more than they do, I'm not going to think much about him, or them. He, and they, are boring, silly, and clueless.

And actually, I wouldn't mind owning a Rolex. They're overpriced and ugly, but I've heard they more than pay for themselves in the amount of female attention a guy gets when wearing one.

Oaph

Contrary to what I thought before, Phred Thompson has ideas. But unfortunately, they're 18th- and 19th-century ideas.

He knows it's '07, but he doesn't know it's 2007.

At a Family Research Council conference today, Phred revealed that he's an admirer of the writings of Andrew Roberts, a pro-imperialist throwback to Eurocentrism, and an apologist for genocide. The website TPM Muckraker reports: "Thompson approvingly quoted the words of one Andrew Roberts, a right-wing British historian who has been hosted at the White House by President Bush and has dined with Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove — and whose writings are quite literally an apologia for 19th and early 20th-century imperialism, concentration camps, and massacres of indigenous peoples."

Roberts was described in a New Republic article six months ago as "a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths."

Nice going, Phred. How's life in the time warp?

And from my Netherlandish correspondent Charikleia, this wonderful unattribued quote: "'Only fools do those villains pity who are punished before they have done their mischief,' Kim quotes, as he shoves a horrid rednecked oaf out of the lifeboat. The sharks cut his his screams to a bearable pitch and period."

Walkin' to New Orleans

Back in the fifties, Fats Domino sang "I'm walkin' to New Orleans." And now in the zeroes, we're all having to walk there 'cause we can't afford to drive.

The economic disaster Republicans and other mentally challenged individuals such as economists said would never happen is suddenly here, with the price of crude oil about to hit $90 a barrel, and $100 a barrel on the horizon, mainly because of the weakening dollar.

Your cost at the pump is just now beginning to reflect the most recent run-up in oil prices. And of course the effects of record levels of foreclosures are already with us, with worse yet to come. The wave of home foreclosures will become a tsunami in January, February, and March of 2008 due to the record number of adjustable rate mortgages that will reset during that 90-day window.

To all those who have been trumpeting how robust and unsinkable the American economy is for the past five years, I'm here to tell you I told you this was going to happen. I'm sure that'll make me a real popular guy, but not as popular as Jim Kunstler, who for a decade has not only predicted the disasters now upon us with unerring accuracy, but has located the causes of what is now unfolding in the frivolous and immature mentality of the American public, its leadership's capacity for denial, and its media information sources' proclivity for choosing the soothing lie over the difficult truth.

Kunstler says the current crisis "could only happen in a culture that has come off the rails mentally, so to speak, as ours has in the sense that nobody has any sense of consequence, neither the leaders nor those who affect to follow the leaders. The leading religion in America is not evangelical Christianity, it is the worship of unearned riches, and its golden rule is the belief that is is possible to get something for nothing. Its holy shrines are Las Vegas and Wall Street. (And, by the way, has anybody heard the evangelical Christians complain about Las Vegas? They complain about a lot of things, but are themselves among the greatest believers in unearned riches -- given their preference for prayer over earnest effort in the service of solving life's problems.)"

The immaturity and atmosphere of unreality that pervades America's dreamlike descent into economic collapse also characterizes its political process, and the two reinforce one another. In a brilliant column in which he asserts that in its national elections, America shows "the collective maturity of 3-year olds," the New York Times's Bob Herbert reviews the election of 2000 as he analyzes why the current election cycle cannot a produce a candidate of Al Gore's quality, and why a campaign based on sound bites, hot button issues, slogans, and name calling is incapable of producing anything other than shallow and narrow-minded candidates, unfitted for anything even remotely resembling real leadership. Most of all, he zeroes in on the corporate media's tendency to evaluate the personalities rather than the positions of presidential contenders.

Recalling that "Mr. Gore was taken to task (by network news anchors) for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes," Herbert reminds us that among these same talking heads, "It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent.

"We’ve paid a heavy price," he then reminds us, although he didn't really need to. "The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt.

"I could go on."

Indeed he could, since besides presiding over a criminal invasion of the Middle East which coincidentally turned out a colossal failure, that candidate you'd most like to have a beer with is now going to see the country descend into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, thanks to his incompetence and ineptitude, and with an assist from our frivolity and immaturity.

What will the result of this crisis be? If it doesn't kill us, it'll make us stronger. We might have to grow up in hurry, and start thinking about how we're going to deal with the end of the age of oil and the automobile, rather than assuming that a cluster of shallow and ignorant leaders whose ineptitude reflects the shallowness and ignorance of the electorate will solve our problems for us.

We might have to stop being shallow and ignorant and talkiing about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and judge for ourselves whether we're actually in danger of being bombed by the Iranians, rather than listening breathlessly and credulously to "a tale told by an idiot, full of the sound and the fury, signifying nothing."

Parallel Passages

George W. Bush is a notably dim bulb, much in the same way Jessica Simpson is also kind of stupid, and both have the same goofy expression and beady-eyed stare that make Jessica Simpson look like a vacant, no-talent singer and actress, and that make George W. Bush look like a guy who should never be photographed or televised standing behind a podium, because he’s so much like a piece of wood it would be hard to tell him from the podium except for the fact that he’s not wood-colored, which wouldn’t be so bad if he’d lived 100 years ago when the podium wouldn’t have caused so much trouble because it wouldn’t exist, since the trees that went into making it would not have been harvested yet, and some think I might agree that he only wears that blue suit because his wife told him to, and you know it’s bad if a guy in that high an office has to depend on his wife to know how to dress and not look funny in public, and we all know which one of the two of them thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just like Pakistan and India, who would hate each others’ guts if countries had guts, and which one wore very short pants in a movie that was about why cousins shouldn’t get married to each other, and Jessica Simpson keeps whoever her boyfriend is a secret which makes her personal life more private and erotic to say the least, while George W. Bush’s wife is known to everybody and it’s in all the newspapers if they even think about doing it and that can’t be any fun, and at least Jessica Simpson has flattering pictures in fanmags and people in Europe and Mexico watch her movies to ogle her body, while Bush is hated by most citizens of his country and all citizens of other countries, but the stress of both their lives might cause their deaths before their old age really even begins, which would pretty much end both the Iraq War and any chance for a Dukes of Hazzard sequel with Jessica Simpson in the part of Daisy Duke’s grandmother.

Nuts

You can't spend any time in internet political discussion groups or chat rooms without confronting the Limbaugh phenomenon. The dittoheads are everywhere, and this makes for a very sad and depressing presentation of a supposedly civilized society.

The proper study of this phenomenon lies not in politics, but in psychology.

The psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung believed that for every case of full-blown insanity in modern societies, there are ten more who are teetering on the brink, and "whose views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors."*

I'm not sure the murderous rage of the dittoheads, openly flaunted as if it was a virtue and source of pride, qualifies as possessing the "appearance of normality," but Limbaugh's listenership and fan base is widesperad enough that it's become part of the landscape.

Jung says further of these semi-lunatics that "the relatively small numbers of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a milieu of this kind (a society constantly agitated and stimulated by mass-media entertainments and sensationalist information) they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. They are therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection..."

The infection Jung speaks of and its manner of spreading is immediately apparent to those of us who spend any amount of time in internet discussion groups. Superpatriots and cheerleaders for monopoloy corporatism, military dictatorship, and endless war burst into these forums in a state of high excitation, agitated by resentment and rage. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of all manner of crimes, and of sinister and evil motives -- collusion with the enemy, wishing for the impoverishment and misery of their own people, hoping for the triumph of moral degeneracy over virtue, and so forth. The accused naturally enough are offended, get angry, and are suckered into responding in kind, rather than doing what they should, and responding calmly. That's how the contagion spreads.

This all makes not only for a sad and tragic state of public discourse, but for truly dangerous and potentially violent domestic politics. And on the world stage, of course, the violence isn't potential, but real, massively deadly, and destructive of everything this country once stood for.

It's time to stop debating. We need to call in the police and mental health authorities and show them the evidence, which will consist of any Rush Limbaugh broadcast chosen at random.

*All remarks quoted from Jung are drawn from his essay "The Undiscovered Self," available in "The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams," published in 1990 as part of Princeton University's Bollingen Series and sold on Amazon.com.

Brokesoul Mountain

And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, & his name that sat on him was death...
--Revelation 6:8

I had a dream last night so clear and vivid that I remembered it in all its details upon awakening.

I was in a room with half a dozen or more cowbyoys, and a mean-looking, lousy crew they were. All around the walls were hung with pistols in holsters, and these holsters hung on belts all stuffed with bullets. The cowboys each took a weapon or weapons from the wall and started for the door.

They went out the door single file, some firing as they went. I couldn't see out, so I have no idea what they were shooting at.

The last cowboy, an old guy, turned back into the room and with an angry look began sweeping weapons off the wall with his hand. Pistolas clattered as they hit the floor, along with large numbers of bullets knocked loose from the belts, and some of these discharged on impact.

The old cowboy was hit with about a dozen of the stray projectiles he'd unloosed. As he lay dying with blood coming out of his head, I could see by his face he didn't give a damn, even for his own life.

And I know for a fact we're in much worse trouble than we think.

The Groovy Side of Torture

People keep coming onto internet discussion groups and chat rooms and emphasizing the negative things about torture. There are also some very nice aspects to torture. We know this is true because there are some people who actually enjoy being tortured.

Some people even like to torture themselves, although this can be hazardous, and those who enjoy self-inflicted pain should probably always use the "buddy system" to insure safety, as the two bims young women in the picture are doing.

Take this guy for example -- a conservative Christian minister, a graduate of Liberty University, and a personal friend of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Rev. Gary Aldridge, 51, was found dead in his home. Police said he was home alone at the time of his demise, and his death was accidental.

At the time he died Rev. Aldridge, pastor of the local Thorington Road Church since 1991, was wearing two wet suits, a rubber face mask, a scuba diving mask, a pair of slippers, a pair of diving gloves, a set of rubber underwear, two ties, five belts, and eleven straps disposed in various ways. For example, one plastic cord secured his ankles to his neck. He also had a dildo in his butt.

The cause of death was asphyxiation.

I hope this settles the debate about torture always being bad once and for all.

It also answers the question, "What do you folks in Alabama do for fun, anyway?"

Role Models

We never outgrow the need for role models, people older and more accomplished than ourselves to serve as examples for us to emulate. One of my most important role models for some time now has been Doris Haddock, better known as Granny D. An excellent writer and speaker, very much in the old-school style, Granny D. is living proof that it's never too late to try to change the world.

On the 18th of this month HBO will run a documentary profiling her rise to fame at an advanced age, "Run, Granny, Run," airing at nine p.m. It will cover her unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire in 2004 and her cross-country walk at age 90 to publicize the need for campaign finance reform. The pilgrimage from Santa Monica to Washington D.C. took over a year, and is chronicled in her book, "Granny D: Walking Across America in My 90th Year."

"(T)he ida of walking across the United States at my age seemed a less than perfect idea. I was being foolish," Haddock wrote in 2001. "The country is too big for an old New Hampshire woman with a bad back and arthritis and emphysema and parched lips and a splintered hat. These were not so much my own thoughts but doubts planted in me by others."

I know what she means. First you have to stop telling yourself you can't do so-and-so, then you've got to stop listening to other people who are telling you that you can't do it. And I also know what she means when she speaks of emphysema, the result of fifty years of smoking. Been there. Done that. Got that.

It took her 14 months, but she made it all the way from the California coast to D.C. Some time earlier in her life, at about age 70 I would guess, she made it all the way from nicotine addiction to complete recovery. So there's hope for me, and I have someone to emulate as I begin the long recovery process.

Now, about that walk to publicize the need to dismantle the war machine...

Don't Ever Be Right

Don't ever be right -- about anything, the price of oil, the Iraq War, because if you do you'll be wrong. It's much better to be wrong, but in the right sort of way.

Back in 2002 Barack Obama was right about the Iraq War before it even started. Now he's in big trouble for it.

There's this Fred Barnes guy, a Fox talking head on a thing called "The Beltway Boys," and on last Saturday's show he says of Obama, "You know, I’ve thought for a long time that Obama’s not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don’t think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be."

Exactly. It was very wrong of Obama to be right about that. He was supposed to believe what "the entire world believed," because the fact that he didn't showed that he's not "very strong on national security."

I see. So back in March, 2003, when I was watching the teevee and realized we were actually going to invade Iraq, I said out loud, "Boy, these clueless morons are gonna get themselves and rest of us in soooooooo much trouble..." And that shows that I secretly sympathize with the terrorists.

Obviously, anybody who's right about stuff should not be taken seriously.

Which leads the NY Times columnist Paul Krugman to observe, "Look at a typical lineup on the Sunday talk shows, discussing the war: you very rarely see an 'expert' on the issue who wasn’t pro-war. Look at a recent panel at Brookings, advertised as representing a 'uniquely broad' range of views on Iraq — from liberal hawks all the way to conservative hawks.

"The fact is that in our national discourse, at least in DC, you’re still considered 'not serious' if you were right about Iraq. And you’re also considered extreme and shrill if you were right about Bush."

So be very careful about that being right stuff. Chances are, anybody who was right about Iraq, is right about Iran, and knows where oil is going is not at all serious. Such people are wild-eyed radicals with lots of strange, liberal ideas, and most of them are probably closet Marxists who believe the government should impose public transportation on innocent motorists.